1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a technology for printing processing in which an electronic document is downloaded via a network such as the Internet and printed as a booklet or a book.
2. Description of the Related Art
To download and print an electronic document stored on a network, hardware is required to enable a continuous connection or dialup connection to the Internet. An electronic document that is stored as a main file such as a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) file may include links to other files. Accordingly, printing a page of the electronic document may require downloading the linked files after downloading the main file.
If the files forming the electronic document are temporarily stored in a local area of a computer before printing, a user needs to modify the absolute path of the links in the main file to a path relative to the location of the files in the local area. Further, printing an electronic document displayed by a Web browser directly causes some problems: Printing navigation icons such as a previous-page button icon, a next-page button icon, a top-page button icon, and navigation banner, which are necessary for browsing but not necessary in the printed material, reduces the density of information on the printed page.
In order to shorten the time required to print an electronic document described in HTML, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 11-25156 describes a method in which a system downloads the files forming the Web page, automatically embeds the path to the linked file (the linked page) at the point of the link anchor to the main file (the main page), and prints the new edited file. According to the method disclosed in 11-25156, the inconvenience of downloading the linked page again and correcting the description of the linked files in the original page manually may be eliminated. The conventional method may also reduce the blank space on each page to some degree. However, in 11-25156, the description of the linked page is simply inserted at the position in the original main HTML file and the processed main page is simply and continuously printed. Therefore, according to the method disclosed in 11-25156, printing or processing Web pages that do not supply a printed material having the proper style of a booklet or book may be difficult.